The principles of colonization in Ireland were applied in North America, too. Many of the financial mechanisms – the creation of joint-stock companies, for example – were similar. Attitudes towards the indigenous peoples also echoed: like the Irish, native Americans were considered lazy, unsophisticated and feckless – adjectives which the British used of natives in plenty of later colonies. But these settlements in the Americas were quite unlike most of the later colonies in Africa or the South Seas. Elsewhere, while English might be the formal language of government, it existed alongside local languages, customs and hierarchies. In the plantations, the English language, English law and the Christian religion excluded others. And because so many of the American settlements were established in a time of philosophical ferment when Thomas Hobbes and John Locke wrestled with the relationship between the individual and the state, when the king was beheaded and John Milton glorified the republic (only for the monarchy then to be restored), these New World settlements had more than a whiff of the Utopian about them, which later found its most concise expression in the commitment in the Declaration of Independence to ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. They offered sanctuary to the Nonconformist and were born with freedom in their very bloodstream. For a government in London, the long-term appeal of allowing or encouraging citizens to travel thousands of miles was the prospect of future dividends: Francis Bacon had said the ‘planting of colonies is like the planting of woods’. In the short term it offered the opportunity to export surplus poor people, landless younger sons of the gentry, religious dissidents and other irritants.
One of the earliest promoters of colonial settlement, Captain John Smith (immortalized in the dreadful Disney cartoon Pocahontas), soon made a claim which recurs throughout British imperial history. Colonial settlement promised England the chance to save itself from the degeneracy which was the fate of every great society. Smith’s fervent patriotism was undimmed by his colourful military background (he had fought for the Austrians against the Turks, killing three men in single combat before later being taken prisoner and sold into slavery). Joining the expedition to found a colony at Jamestown, in Chesapeake Bay, Virginia, in 1607 must initially have seemed just another adventure. Certainly, his fellow colonists did not find him a particularly congenial companion and he was soon in chains, accused of plotting mutiny. It was only when they opened the sealed box they had been given by the expedition’s commercial sponsors that his travelling companions – largely ‘gentlemen’ – made the unfortunate discovery that the company had chosen the soldier-of-fortune as one of the governors of the settlement. Class sensitivities were outraged, and continued to damage the Virginia project. The ‘gentlemen’ might have been content to go in for a spot of dashing robbery of a Spaniard, but they were damned if they were going to undertake anything as menial as tilling the soil or running fishing boats. Successful colonies, Smith later observed with a shrug, really needed people who could practise a trade.
From his experiences in Virginia, and his later attempts to establish colonies further north on the American coast – the area he named ‘New England’ – Smith concluded that it was really no good using plantations merely as places to dispose of indigent toffs and riff-raff who would otherwise be in prison or begging on the streets: the ideal settlement should reflect a true cross-section of society. On the model of the colony at Jamestown, in which those who bought shares became entitled to a share of any profits, Smith hoped to raise money from investors in future settlement schemes. Though he (of course) made a point of emphasizing the missionary role of settlers – godly people who would be carrying the gospel to benighted parts of the world – what he really wanted was a selection of people with useful skills, who might be expected to know about such things as the cultivation of vines or the manufacture of glass. America, he warned, was not a place to be plundered for gold, silver or precious stones, but ‘all you expect from thence must be by labour’. Sir Walter Raleigh (Humphrey Gilbert’s half-brother) had sailed up the Orinoco, his mind filled with fantasies of cities piled with gold and silver. He returned to England in 1618, a broken man and shortly to face execution. John Smith’s model for an American empire was entirely different: the example, he suggested, was not that of Spain and its plunder, but that of Holland, where a wealthy empire had been constructed on timber and the ‘contemptible Trade of Fish’. The future of empire-building, he said, belonged not to swashbuckling buccaneers but to merchants in their counting houses.
There is one other characteristic perhaps worth noting about these early colonies. Although they were commercial positions, they were ‘royal’. Throughout the empire’s life foreign territories were claimed and administered in the name of the Crown: they were sometimes even spoken of as ornaments to royal necklaces or jewels in the crown. When the English revolution overthrew and executed the king in the middle of the seventeenth century, Oliver Cromwell turned out to be as interested in imperial possessions as any king or queen: it is striking that the freedom which was said to have engulfed England in the Commonwealth in 1649 did not represent an opportunity for the British ‘dominions and territories’ overseas to make their own destinies. They were simply declared now to belong to the ‘people of England’. As it turned out, Cromwell colonized as enthusiastically as anyone – and even more brutally. His campaign to extinguish dissent in Ireland is remembered to this day for its savagery.* In 1654 he dispatched a fleet to the Caribbean with orders to seize Hispaniola, which might then be used ‘for the transplanting as much of our peoples from New England, Virginia, the Barbados, the Summer Islands [Bermuda], or from Europe, as we see requisite’. (That attack failed, although other islands were taken.) At home, the increasingly vainglorious Cromwell was travelling the familiar route from revolutionary to tyrant, cheered on by sycophants like the poet Edmund Waller, whose ‘Panegyric to my Lord Protector’ referred to England as ‘The seat of Empire’. The rumour went that parliament was considering offering him the title of emperor. The country was approaching the point where overseas possessions were a necessity of office.
Chapter Two
‘I had in the Name of His Majesty taken possession of several places upon this Coast’
Captain James Cook, 1770
The grandest imperial tableau of the eighteenth century is Benjamin West’s monumental The Death of General Wolfe. It purports to show the moment when the victor of the 1759 battle of Quebec breathed his last. In the foreground the young general’s musket and hat lie on the ground. At his feet a loyal, half-naked native American kneels, chin on hand, a ‘noble savage’ contemplating a fallen god. To the general’s right and left stand anxious red-coated officers, in front, in the tartan of the regiment he had raised to serve the British Crown, the clan chief of the Frasers; above the dying general’s head a vast Union flag thrusts heavenwards. James Wolfe lies on his side, his eyes cast upwards at the clearing sky as the dark clouds of battle drift away. A waving messenger approaches, clutching the French flag. He brings news of the extinction of French claims on Canada.
It is pure propaganda, a political pietà created to sanctify the collection of overseas possessions which during the eighteenth century the British were increasingly justified in terming an empire. There was more. Handel’s oratorios likened Britain to the biblical Israel, the captured flags of defeated enemies were laid up in St Paul’s Cathedral and statues of exotic animals demonstrated the taming of the world. Benjamin West’s painting is a fantasy, painted more than a decade after the battle: there were no Indians fighting with the British and half the officers depicted weren’t even on the battlefield at the moment of Wolfe’s death, the general having been struck by French rounds in the wrist, stomach and chest as he led a British charge. But none of that takes away from Wolfe’s achievement in defeating a French army ensconced at the top of what its commander the Marquis de Montcalm believed to be unscalable heights. Wolfe’s tactics in ferrying five thousand men across the St Lawrence River and then having them climb
the cliffs in virtual silence ranks among the most brilliant in the history of all imperial wars. When the French poured out of their fort in Quebec on to the Plains of Abraham, they were cut down by British muskets.
The Seven Years War of 1756–63 has often been considered the first ‘world war’. It certainly shares its European origins with the First and Second World Wars. But it might also be considered the point at which the British recognized the extent to which their destiny lay not in Europe but elsewhere. There was, anyway, little or no land to be had in Europe, and seizing it would incur lasting menace from some other continental power. But abroad was another matter. In the treaty which ended the War of the Spanish Succession, fifty years earlier, Britain had acquired Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and the Hudson’s Bay territory in North America, along with Gibraltar and Minorca in the Mediterranean and St Kitts at the entrance to the Caribbean. Now the British had their eyes on other pieces of abroad. The talks to end the Seven Years War dragged on through the winter of 1762–3, with endless haggling over tiny islands and quick slashes of the pen disposing of chunks of a continent or two. The British negotiator in Paris was the stubby, self-important, gout-stricken Duke of Bedford, whom public opinion at home judged to be in danger of being altogether too soft on the French. Nonetheless, in the peace agreement signed on 10 February 1763 he pushed the boundaries of British rule further than most campaigns of conquest, and in so doing profoundly changed the character of the growing empire.
The British had had colonies before the Treaty of Paris. But the empire which followed was a very different enterprise. The colonies in North America had been planted with British men and women who grew crops for export to Britain and bought home-manufactured goods in return. In language, law and customs they were Anglo-Saxon. In the Caribbean white men owned and ran estates and made the wealth to pass themselves off as toffs back home. In Asia, the British presence had been largely confined to trading, as the East India Company ran cotton, silk and tea from ports at Calcutta, Madras, Bombay and Canton. Now, the British became masters of much of North America: under the terms of the treaty the French surrendered to them all their North American mainland territories east of the Mississippi. Spain in turn gave up Florida. The limits of Britain’s dominion on that continent were very hard to determine, ‘for to the northward it would seem that we might extend our claims quite to the pole itself’, ran a popular account. ‘To the westward our boundaries reach to nations unknown even to the native Indians of Canada. If we might hazard a conjecture, it is nearly equal to the extent of all Europe.’ And, better than Europe, it was unpopulated by pesky Europeans with armies and gunpowder.
It was now undeniable that Britain was the pre-eminent world power. But it was the acquisition of territories elsewhere that would enable the British to build what the world came to recognize as their empire. Outside North America, the French ceded Senegal in Africa and a further smattering of islands in the Caribbean. What really changed things, however, was a battle which had occurred 7,000 miles from Quebec. At Plassey in Bengal, in June 1757, Robert Clive had led East India Company troops to a remarkable victory, and through clever tactical planning, dishonesty and low cunning, had taken control of an area bigger than Britain itself. In the Treaty of Paris the French essentially abandoned their ambitions in India. The British now had an entirely different sort of cornucopia lying before them, so that when in due course the American colonies seized the independence which had grown out of the Utopian ambitions of so many of their founders, India and the rest of the world offered the British an alternative focus of ambition. Unlike the English-speaking plantations of the Americas, these increasingly important new territories, with their local princes, profoundly different religious faiths, colourful cultural traditions and idiosyncratic legal systems, were an altogether more complicated proposition than what had gone before.
If the British were able to consider the world their oyster, it was one which had grown around a piece of French grit.
The Seven Years War had been a massively expensive enterprise for all concerned: the British national debt had virtually doubled. On top of that, the vast new territories offered up by the peace settlement promised further big bills for administration and protection. The obvious solution was to milk the colonial cow. The burden fell on the settlers in North America, for whom the London government proposed taxes on a range of commodities, including official papers, sugar, paint, lead, glass and, most famously, tea. This practice of making the cost of empire fall upon those who had been colonized was one that would later be applied elsewhere, sometimes with disgraceful consequences – oppressing people to pay for their oppression.* But in this case the plantation territories of New England contained plenty of settlers who came from families that had left the British Isles to escape overweaning government and religious discrimination: the military campaign of resistance they now began would deliver the colonies their independence from Britain. One of the most striking things about the war, whose trigger was the cry ‘no taxation without representation’, is the very British nature of the conflict, for that issue had been a repeated theme in the nation’s history, most notably in the English Civil War. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the most influential revolutionary tract ever written, was published in Philadelphia as ‘written by an Englishman’. This extraordinary state of affairs was made a great deal worse by the utter incompetence of the government in finding itself embarking on a war against its closest natural ally while having simultaneously failed to secure adequate counterbalancing allies elsewhere. The Earl of Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, noted bleakly that ‘If Russia declares against us, we shall then literally speaking be in actual war with the whole world.’ His own actions spoke volumes: while the colonists in America were polishing the rolling sentences of the Declaration of Independence, he had been off on a three-week trout-fishing holiday.
The war was an unmitigated disaster. When news of the British surrender at Yorktown reached the Prime Minister, Lord North, he took it ‘as he would have taken a ball in his breast’, exclaiming, ‘Oh god! It’s all over,’ and throwing his arms in the air. There was some bleak comfort in the retention of Canada and the West Indies, but when the former Foreign Secretary Lord Stormont saw that all thirteen of the rebel colonies had gone he despaired. ‘There is not a ray of light left,’ he sighed. ‘All is darkness.’ Culprits were sought. Charles James Fox (who had supported the revolutionaries, as he would later support the revolutionaries in France) blamed the king. Many others saw the loss of the colonies as the product of some moral decadence in the nation. The Newcastle Chronicle wailed that ‘Everything human … has its period: nations, like mortal men, advance only to decline; dismembered empire and diminished glory mark a crisis in the constitution; and, if the volume of our frame [national story] be not closed, we have read the most brilliant pages of our history.’ This piece of journalistic breast-beating turned out to be as wide of the mark as so many later, similar examples of the genre, for there was a century of increasing global dominance ahead. But it would be a very different sort of imperial enterprise. The war with the American colonists had been quite unlike previous conflicts, in which the enemy had generally been either a less technologically advanced people or a foreign-speaking, Roman Catholic power intent on destroying the nation’s political and religious settlement. The colonists, by contrast, spoke the same language and enjoyed the same cultural traditions, and there was a sense in which all they sought were the rights their kin increasingly took for granted at home. Stoical souls in Britain refused to see it as a defeat in any real sense. ‘Tho’ we have not been conquerors,’ said John Andrews, ‘we yet remain unconquered.’ But the plain fact was that the war had been lost, and lost catastrophically.
Lost, too, was an idea of what the empire was like. Henceforth the belief that it was something like an extended family would not be adequate. The second incarnation of empire was a much more diverse place and it would require a different style of government and a dif
ferent sense of what it was for.
On the afternoon of 21 August 1770, a small party of sailors ran their boat ashore on the beach of a largely barren island off the north coast of what we now call Australia. From a distance, they had spotted a group of naked brown men on the shore, most of them carrying spears and one with a bow and arrow. But by the time they stepped ashore, the hunters had vanished. The Endeavour, the vessel from which the tender had set off, lay a short distance offshore, having bumped her way steadily up the east coast of the enormous landmass, producing the first outline maps of the great southern continent. There had been a terrifying near-catastrophe a few weeks earlier, when the man sounding the depths below the ship’s keel had shouted ‘Seventeen fathoms’ and, before he could swing the lead again, the ship had suddenly grounded on part of what we now know as the Great Barrier Reef, tearing a hole in her bottom. The captain, James Cook, had managed to patch the boat up and was now planning a route home to Britain via the Dutch colonies in Indonesia and then around the Cape of Good Hope. Cook believed he had finally sighted a channel of clear water which bore off in the direction of the Dutch territories, but sought a higher vantage point than was available from his ship’s mast. So he climbed to the top of a hill and spied out the sea. It seemed to offer the passage to the north-west that he was looking for. And then, just before re-embarking, Cook’s men raised a pole, ran up a flag and claimed for their king the coastline of this vast new land ‘together with all the bays, harbours, rivers and islands situate upon the said coast’. Three volleys of small-arms fire and three answering volleys from the ship rang across the wilderness. Then, keen to catch the tide, the sailors clambered into their boat and pulled for the mother-ship. In their little impromptu ceremony they had effectively added a continent to the British Empire. Not that they knew quite that, for Cook gave the place no name, and most of the rest of the landmass was still to be mapped. What is remarkable is how casually it all happened. Cook himself merely noted in his journal that he had already ‘in the name of His Majesty taken possession of several places upon this coast’. Some of those who took part in the flag-planting didn’t even bother to mention it in their records of the journey.
Empire Page 5
